Joseph Stiglitz

Wealth has besotted people since time immemorial. It’s accrued, amassed, hidden, stolen and we would even die sometimes for it, or at least knock someone off more than likely to get what they have.

Qatar has enough natural gas to make every citizen of the country wealthier than any other in the world. Sheikh Tamim bin Khaifa Al Thani, the Emir of Qatar is a new ambitious determined leader that plans to make Qatar a prominent country in the world.

Why on earth does the UN Security Council still exist when the rules and regulations that the people who have the right to veto set up in the first place are dumped just as quick as you can say Bachar al-Assad?

The newspapers of the mainstream media across the Western world are jumping on the same bandwagon and making sure that the most used word this week is Syria followed closely by ‘bomb the b’stards’.

The Buffets and the Gates of the US will be shedding a few tears this week as the United States and Switzerland have reached an agreement that brings the status of the latter as a tax haven for Americans (or will they?).

Fingers have two things which are common to them all over the world, wherever we come from. They are all different, which at least is one thing in common. Then they are prone to being fat and clumsy whether that be from New York to Hong Kong; especially in the financial world.

Slavery was meant to have vanished from the face of the Earth, or at least from our modern societies years ago. But, it hasn’t. We all know that.

There’s too much of a sameness about Japan and the USA today. The Land of the Rising Sun and good old Uncle Sam have been copying each other far too much and now it seems as if they are railroading on the same train to the Land of Debt.

It’s a big mistake. Maybe some might say that the Fed altogether is a mistake itself. But, it’s made some big, ugly mistakes that don’t bare thinking about and yet there’s no understanding why they took those decisions.

French President François Hollande jumped straight in declaring in more Sarkozy-style fashion than ex-President Sarkozy himself that he would attack Syria. That was even before the UN investigators had been shot at by some unidentified people.

If Syria is invaded by the West, then we should be getting ready for a hike in the price of Brent that some say may reach a much as $150 since it will escalate into a regional problem and affect supplies coming out of Iraq.

It's funny: nearly five years ago, when we first started, and said that the world is doomed to an endless cycle of bubble, financial crisis and currency collapse as long as the Fed is around, most people laughed: after all they had very serious reputations aligned with a broken and terminally disintegrating economic lie. With time some came to agree with our viewpoint, but most of the very serious people continued to laugh. Fast forward to last night when we read, in that very bastion of very serious opinions, the Financial Times, the following sentence: "The world is doomed to an endless cycle of bubble, financial crisis and currency collapse." By the way, the last phrase can be written in a simpler way: hyperinflation. But that's not all: when the FT sounds like the ZH, perhaps it is time to turn off the lights. To wit: "A stable international financial system has eluded the world since the end of the gold standard." Q.E.D.

The Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act. It’s a mammoth of a reform bill and runs 844 pages (plus 350 pages of annexes). A needed overhaul of the 1986 law, but it will have its downsides too.

Syrian President Bachar al-Assad has warned President Obama not to take military action against his country since: “Failure awaits the United States as in all previous wars it has unleashed, starting with Vietnam and up to the present day”.

A study carried out recently by Nature Climate Change took a look at and analyzed past and present floods in the world and was able to predict the future floods that will take place concerning 136 cities.